SEM Playlist: Articles of the Week 3/1/13

Welcome to another edition of the Amplify Interactive SEM playlist. It’s been a week now since Searchfest 2013 ended and we’re just now getting back to normal! There’s been a lot of conversation around the office about what we learned, what our favorite sessions were, piecing together what happened at the afterparty… Great speakers, great networking, great after-party.. everything great. Check out this Storify to relive the festivities and feel that Searchfest vibe once again! But now it’s time to move on to the SEM Playlist. These are articles that the Amplify team shared with each other this week and now we’re sharing them with you!

The Oregonian ran an article about the growing search engine marketing industry in Portland and last Friday’s SearchFest at the Governor Hotel and interviewed our president and SEMpdx cofounder Ben Lloyd. The article offers a nice overview of the local industry and the ever-popular conference, and puts everything in layman’s terms. Check it out!

Infographics don’t have to be complicated to get the point across. Image credit: my.opera.com

It’s really amazing what you can do in PowerPoint. For those of us without a design background, PowerPoint is a great way to make simple yet engaging infographics. This article really does a good job of explaining the process and offers some great templates to get you started (in exchange for your contact info). Have you made an infographic in PowerPoint? Have any other ideas about making infographics? Lets discuss in the comments.

A great article that tells you why you should care about Google+ and gives some great pointers on how to use it. This article offers action steps you can take now to start building up your G+ presence. Among other things, G+ is a great way to network, promote your content and it’s tremendous for SEO. For an example of the power of G+ for SEO, the other day I searched Google for “Harlem Shake” and the fourth result was a G+ post from John Chavez, a guy I went to school with and who is active on G+.

I wouldn’t say John is a huge authority on the Harlem Shake, but since I have him in my circles and he created a post about it, he ranks highly for that term for me when I’m logged in to Google. Beginning to see the power of growing your G+ network? Read the article for a great rundown on Google+. Obviously it’s kind of a big deal!

As part of the new enhanced campaigns, Google has upgraded call extensions and sitelinks with new features to help advertisers reach customers in more relevant ways across multiple devices and in different contexts. Among the new features: AdWords reports can now count phone calls as conversions alongside traditional conversions. Read the article for more info. Google also is offering free webinars on enhanced campaigns.

Note: Raven is an application used by the SEO and PPC industry. Now that Raven has stopped offering unauthorized Google SERP rankings and keyword data, they seem to be aggressively expanding their toolset. This site auditor is the latest addition, and it seems to be a direct competitor to SEOmoz’s Crawl Test tool. Hey, competition is good, right? We’ve yet to delve deeply into what Raven’s Site Auditor can do, but I for one plan on learning more as soon as I get some time. On the surface there seems to be some interesting things that differentiate it from SEOmoz’s tool. One thing I find particularly interesting and want to learn more about is semantics reporting (which makes use of the open source Open Calais). I’d love to hear other people’s thoughts on this. Have you taken a look at this new feature yet? What do you like about it? Has it missed the mark in any way?

What have I missed? Did you read anything really awesome that you’d like to share? Please let me know in the comments! And make sure to follow Amplify Interactive on LinkedIn! Till next time…

See you at Searchfest 2014! From left to right: Jennifer, Brendan, Brent, Ryan, and Ashley.

About Brent Baltzer

Brent Baltzer is a Junior Account Manager at Add3, a search engine marketing agency with offices in Portland & Seattle. Brent would love to connect with you on Google+, LinkedIn and Twitter (@brentbaltzer)!